Johnny Skeptic

Message to Gundulf and ksen: Does inerrancy assume that none of the texts have been tampered with by people who God did not inspire to write the Bible? If so, what evidence do you have that none of the texts have been tampered with by people who God did not inspire to write the Bible? Today, it would certainly be a simple matter for some skeptics to change parts of the Bible significantly, take it to some remote jungle regions, and deceive at least a few people at least some of the time. That proves that God has not chosen to defend the integrity of the texts. In addition, the book of Revelation warns against tampering with the texts. If tampering were not possible, there would have been no need for the warnings.

I do not see why God would be interested in providing Christians with inerrant texts since he refused to provide any texts at all, whether innerant or errant, to the hundreds of millions of people who died without hearing the Gospel message.

Where did inerrantists get the notion that the Bible is inerrant?

Gundulf

No. Best example is perhaps in 1 John, the section where the trinitarian language was intentionally or perhaps unintentionally added.

Johnny Skeptic

What does inerrancy assume?

ksen

Inerrancy only applies to the originals so to talk about inerrant modern texts/translations is meaningless.

Johnny Skeptic

But no one knows what the originals said. Whatever they said, there is not any credible evidence that they were inerrant.

Regarding what the Bible says about homosexuality, what evidence do you have that the writers were speaking for God and not for themselves?

ksen

That's nice. You still can't take a term used only for the originals and try to apply it to the extant texts we do have.

What evidence would you accept?

Johnny Skeptic

Why are you concerned with just me? There are lots of other people besides me who want to know what your evidence is.
People cannot judge for or against your evidence until they know what it is. What is your evidence? You do not have any credible evidence that the writers were speaking for God and not for themselves and you know it. Why must God conform to your emotional needs?

James Brown

But doesn't Oral Tradition just remove the problem further back? Whoever told Moses all this oral tradition, who told that guy? And who told all the ones before him? Who was the first person to start the ball rolling, and how reliable is he? Was it the original Adam? How did he know what went on before he was created? How did he know what God and Cain talked about privately? Why should we rely on oral tradition, so much so that some want to use it as a source text in high school science classes, when it's so unreliable in every other area? You would never rely on Oral Tradition for any other creed, why this one?

Not only is Oral Tradition unreliable, it's unverifiable. How do we know we have accurate retellings? What control methods were put in place from the very beginning to make sure that nothing was added or left out? Are we to believe that across all those centuries, from the first story-teller until Moses, that not one single person added something he thought was interesting, or embellished a story, or forgot an item?

And as for Divine Revelation, how does that work? How do we sift through multiple claims of Divine Revelation? What standard do we use when different claims of Divine Revelation disagree? What's the difference between saying the Moses received Divine Revelation and that Moses dreamed it all up?


If the passages aren't relevant to your argument, then no it wouldn't.

Not at all. I use on-line sources all the time, but I try to make the research relevant to the topic at hand.

Your original statement was: "Jesus attributes authorship to Moses. Who am I to secondguess Him?" To back up your assertion, you listed four passages, seven verses in all. I checked your work and found that in all but one verse, Jesus did NOT attribute authorship to Moses. It appeared to me that you simply went to an online bible source like biblegateway.com, popped in a keyword 'Moses', narrowed your search to just the four gospels, and cited the references. But since the passages don't say what you implied they say, I just think that's poor scholarship, that's all.


Maybe, but that wasn't the issue, was it? I think your argument was, "This particular person (Jesus) who is never wrong about anything made a factual statement so that means the fact is correct, period." Invoking Jesus' name in this case is like quoting Stephen Hawking when discussing black holes--he knows what he's talking about, so accept what he says and move on. So first you said that Jesus supported Moses' authorship, and then to prove that you listed verses in which other people supported Moses' authorship. So the question continues--how did the Sadducees, and the disciples, and the authors of the gospels know that Moses wrote the Pentateuch? All we have is the Oral Tradition and Divine Revelation arguments, which suffer from all the problems listed above.

Believing that Moses wrote the Pentateuch may be a article of faith for you, but there's no way to defend it using reason.

Johnny Skeptic

No, an anonymous Bible writer ALLEGED that Jesus attributed authorship to Moses. The writer did not claim that Jesus told him that, and the writer did not reveal who his sources were.

Gundulf

I can't speak for ksen's reasons for believing Mosaic authorship. But the scholarly debate on the subject focuses on Moses having both the motive and opportunity to have written those the works attributed to him, in addition to the tradition of Mosaic authorship that had to have come from somewhere.

Genesis and Exodus, for instance, is replete with examples of why Israel should continue to follow Moses. Inhereting the Promised land was guarenteed by God to Abraham, Abraham made a similar journey to the same land, Moses' idea to go to the promised land was assured by God, etc., etc., etc.

From a purely secular view, there are many reasons why, if Moses had existed, he would have been highly motivated to write histories/mythologies such as Genesis, which would have been endorsing his program. Inserting the big promise to Abraham in Genesis 15 about "Know that your descendents will be enslaved for 400 years, but I will punish the nation that has enslaved them" is a bit anachronistic for anyone but Moses/Joshua to have inserted - why would anyone many years later have been trying to 'justify' the Exodus?

The leader of a movement like this, that (well asserted to in the texts themselves) was hardly unanimously supported (with constant references to various coop conspiracies to unseat Moses)... Books like the Pentateuch is exactly what one would expect from such a leader.